Is Warby Parker Too Good to Last?

The first thing to know is that I’m wearing a pair of Warby Parker glasses as I write this. My bias is as plain as the frames on my face. I like the company I’m writing about.

I like that Warby Parker’s glasses have a distinctive style—a little bit mid-century, a little bit nerdy. I like how the four-year-old startup ships five pairs of glasses at a time for free to try on at home. I like how the glasses mostly cost less than $100. And I like how their customer service seems to be conducted by real people, not robots or, even worse, people trained to act like robots. Through a combination of good product design, a deep commitment to user experience, and supply-chain smarts, Warby Parker has managed in four years to build a company that in my experience as a customer is doing just about everything right. Which is why I worry that it can’t last. After all, if not sucking was a sure way to build a sustainable business, why don’t more try it?

Case in point: On Wednesday, Warby Parker announced a milestone involving another good thing it does. For every pair of glasses sold, the company donates another pair to VisionSpring, a charity that trains people in low-income communities around the world to conduct eye exams and set up businesses selling glasses for a few bucks a piece. Warby says that, as of now, it has donated one million pairs of glasses. “When we launched Warby Parker, we thought we were going to have to beg our parents to go online and buy one or two pairs a day to keep us in business,” co-founder and co-CEO Neil Blumenthal told WIRED. “So this wildly exceeds our expectations.”

Making the Math Work

As easy as it is to snark about corporate do-gooderism, I have a hard time faulting Warby for what it’s doing—consider the alternative of not giving away any glasses. VisionSpring, which Blumenthal directed before he started Warby, seems to take a particularly non-patronizing approach of trying to figure out what glasses people might actually want to wear, instead of just shipping them rich countries’ cast-offs. “Fashion matters no matter where you live, no matter how much money you have,” Blumenthal says. (Gold wire and gun metal frames are popular in India and Bangladesh, he says, while Central America goes for more New York-Los Angeles styles.) My question is more around how a startup that already isn’t charging very much for its product can afford shaving even more off its bottom line by giving away a percentage of every sale. Can any startup survive like this? Or is doing good bad for business?

As the head of a private company still getting off the ground, Blumenthal was unsurprisingly non-specific about the math behind Warby’s program. “You make it work,” he said. “The same question could be said of why we offer free shipping to our customers, or why we offer lunch to our employees three days a week. If it’s important to you as an organization, you find a way to make it work.”

Blumenthal said Warby doesn’t discuss its sales figures. But since the company gives away a pair of glasses for every pair sold, and since it says it’s given away a million pairs of glasses, Warby Parker has likely sold at least a million pairs of glasses. (“I think that’s a safe assumption,” Blumenthal amiably conceded, though he added that there’s a lag between the time a customer buys a pair of glasses and a donated pair ends up on someone else’s face.) At about $100 a piece, that’s at least $100 million in sales over four years. That sounds pretty great by normal standards, though modest by Silicon Valley’s steroidal metrics. Warby also has more than $115 million in venture capital funding to keep the company’s ideal version of itself going.

The Shoals of Shipping

But neither of these numbers totally alleviates my anxiety over whether Warby can keep doing what it’s doing over the long term. Much more than its charitable donations, I worry about free shipping. I’ve had at least four shipments of Warby glasses sent to me so far to try on (returning them is also free), and so far, I’ve bought only one pair. It’s a fantastic option, but if everyone else abuses it the way I do, the costs are bound to add up. At Amazon, shipping—including unlimited two-day shipping through Amazon Prime—costs the company billions annually. While Amazon appears to be one of the most powerful companies in the world, its profits are slim to none, which leads bearish investors to question how long Amazon can sustain what people like most about it, including Prime and low prices.

Warby Parker

With its nine-figure funding, Warby Parker seems to be seeking out an approach similar to Amazon’s—not in the sense of trying to sell everything, but by building, like Amazon, a rapid growth engine powered by giving customers exactly what they want. All solvent companies operate according to a compromise between satisfying customer desires and meeting bottom-line goals. The most popular companies are often the ones that do the best job at concealing that compromise, of making customers and users almost feel like they’re getting away with something.

Warby Parker has always been a favorite of the tech cognoscenti, but not because of any feat of technological engineering. Warby is rather striving to become a case study in innovative business engineering—marketing, design, vertical integration, service, and delivery. It’s what Silicon Valley would consider the soft stuff, and what customers experience as the rare feat of not sucking.

In a way, that “not sucking” is what nearly all high-tech innovation is striving to make possible, though that ultimate vision often gets lost in the specs. If all that hacking doesn’t make something better in a simple way—say, buying a new pair of glasses–then what’s the point? Warby Parker is making the bet that doing the right thing can underwrite a strong, sustainable business. To come out ahead, Blumenthal and company have to keep hacking away at one of the more paradoxical problems in business: making it easy and fun for people to buy things actually makes the math that much harder.

Here’s The Thing With Ad Blockers

We get it: Ads aren’t what you’re here for. But ads help us keep the lights on. So, add us to your ad blocker’s whitelist or pay $1 per week for an ad-free version of WIRED. Either way, you are supporting our journalism. We’d really appreciate it.